The Japanese way and the ephemeral, the meaning of life enclosed in a flower, the brevity of beauty, the poetry of a life that starts and soon ends, the transience of all, the aching pink…there is one single word in Japanese to describe the Japanese spirit. No, it is not geisha, neither is karaoke…
It is the word 桜 (sakura , cherry blossom), which alone holds a world and even more of meanings within.

The cherry blossom represents beauty and perfection: the petals, five, gracefully sitting around a perfect corolla, bright or light pink, or white with just a blush, like the young women's fresh faces, when they blush for the slightest thing.
The cherry blossom represents calmness and placidity: it opens up slowly, shyly, as if it were asking for permission to show up, weak and harmless facing its fate, conscious of the important role it has, despite itself.
The cherry blossom represents rebirth: the winter cold stripped the leaves off the trees which seem dead. But one day nature wakes up, lymph starts again to flow and an explosion of colours comes from the nothing. The miracle of life happens again.
The cherry blossom represents impermanence: it blooms overnight, it makes the soul rejoice, it brings hope, but soon after it withers and dies. It reminds people everything as a beginning and an end.
The cherry blossom represents melancholy and sadness: its life is short, its beauty expires soon, the wind blows petals and happiness away.
How many poems inspired by the pink, fleeting beauty, how many parties under the cherry trees, how melancholic that carpet of petals!

As sakura, so is the Japanese lifestyle: nothing lasts forever. Things, people, feelings have an expiration date, death follows life and the interval between the two extremes is just a tiny parenthesis of acute gloom. The Japanese don't regard the future as a goal, but rather as the end of a journey, whether today or in thousands years doesn't matter, and they endure life in apathy, they focus on those little meaningless things, in venerating beauty, in improving every gesture to mastering it, in manically caring for details…this is simply to evade from short-lived reality.

We, ordinary living beings, can't grasp this deep truth, and we merely get influenced by the euphoric atmosphere.

I dare you not to stop by a cherry tree to admire it, I dare you not to take photographs of such a manifestation of life! It doesn't matter how many times the natural cycle is repeated, in the very same conditions, year after year in front of our eyes, we have all been there, impatient, anxious to go out, to be fascinated by the ethereal and yet ephemeral beauty of a simple, tiny, fragile flower.

Go and wonder, look at things with a new awareness, change your point of observation.